By Caylee J. Hong, University of California, Berkeley §
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2023 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists.
ABSTRACT: With 26 oil and gas fields and over 5,000 wells, no place on earth has so many wells, so close to so many people as Los Angeles (LA) (Smith, 2022). This paper examines the ongoing legacy of urban wells, the majority of which are now defunct, deserted, and often indiscernible to LA residents. Drawing upon 18 months of dissertation fieldwork and archival research, I explore how residents of Vista Hermosa, a diverse, historically working class neighborhood just a mile north of downtown LA, are organizing to decommission hundreds of wells in the Los Angeles City Oil Field (Figure 1). As the oldest field in the LA Basin, most wells there are idle—they have not been active for at least two consecutive years but are not “plugged and abandoned” (the technical term for “decommissioned”) to current state regulatory standards. Many are also presumed to be orphan wells—they lack a solvent or legally responsible owner/operator to pay for their decommissioning. For over a decade, Vista Hermosa residents have filed complaints to state and local officials about rotten smells and illnesses that they attribute to long-forgotten wells buried alongside their homes, schools, and parks.
Figure 1: Map of the Oil and Gas Fields in the LA Basin. (FracTracker Alliance)
In this paper I explore how residents make visible the neighborhood’s petroleum past and its implications for safe and equitable redevelopment. First, I describe the ongoing advocacy of a small network of neighbors who have created the Vista Hermosa Community Group. I focus here on their oil well tour, which they have developed to show fellow residents, environmental justice organizers, and politicians the existence and impact of oil wells, nearly all that are invisible above-ground (Figures 2 and 3). Second, I show the persistent and unique risks of urban oil wells by examining the decommissioning history of two orphan wells capped in Vista Hermosa in 2016. Finally, I argue that rapid real estate development in the area is compounding risks of environmental harm, displacement, and gentrification. In particular, I consider the impacts of neighborhood densification and the shifting of responsibility for well decommissioning from public authorities to private developers. (Figure 4)
Figures 2 and 3: Environmental justice organizers learn about orphan wells buried under garages and new apartments and visit one of the very last active oil operations in the LA City Field on the Vista Hermosa Oil Well Tour (co-organized with the LA hub of the Sunrise Movement) in May 2023. Photos by Jacob Ruiz.
Figure 4: Environmental justice organizers raise awareness about orphan oil wells underneath their community (including directly under a new apartment building) at an August 2022 rally in Vista Hermosa. Photo by Caylee Hong.
The paper is part of a broader dissertation project, which examines the lasting impacts of fossil fuels. Even if we rapidly transition to other energy systems, we will continue to be entangled with fossil fuels long after production ends, particularly through the oil and gas wells that remain embedded in the landscape. Across the United States, there are approximately 2.6 million unplugged onshore wells, and another 1.2 million that are undocumented (Schuwerk and Rogers, 2020). In California alone there are nearly 107,000 documented unplugged onshore wells and another 1,500 in state waters (Boomhower, Shybut, and DeCillis, 2018; CalGEM, 2022). As Vista Hermosa residents (and other frontline communities) have argued, wells have significant environmental, financial, and public health impacts when they are actively productive and when they are not (González et al, 2023; Shamasunder, 2023; Sierra Club, 2023). Idle wells can leak methane, benzenes, sulfates, arsenic, and chloride into the air and aquifers. Methane can also cause explosions and fires when trapped in enclosed spaces—a problem for LA, with its thousands of miles of pavement and other impermeable surfaces (Masters, 2016). As former employees of the state oil and gas regulator told me, even wells decommissioned to today’s standards are at risk of leaking one day.
Through wells and the legal, financial, and political systems that produce them, oil will shape the world far beyond the dismantling of fossil fuel production (Szeman, 2016). My paper and dissertation grapple with the ways that infrastructures, including oil wells, shape the possibilities for our urban environmental futures. In particular, I draw upon and expand the existing scholarship on infrastructure (such as Anand, 2017; Appel, 2019; Howe et al, 2016; Weszkalnys, 2023) to analyze decommissioning as a critical but underexamined phase in the lifespan of fossil fuels. Throughout the LA Basin and elsewhere, people will have to live with and amongst wells—not to mention refineries, pipelines, and mines—that must be (or, should be) decommissioned, monitored, and maintained in perpetuity (Figures 5, 6, and 7, all photos taken of cities in LA County).
Figure 5: Children playing at Discovery Well Park in Signal Hill amongst oil wells. Photo by Caylee Hong.
Figure 6: Houses and a playground are directly adjacent to oil wells in Santa Fe Springs (only fencing around well is visible). Photo by Caylee Hong.
Figure 7: Oil operations continue alongside the Long Beach Municipal Cemetery. Photo by Caylee Hong.
Works Cited
Anand, N. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Durham: Duke University Press).
Appel, H. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea (Durham: Duke University Press).
Boomhower, J., M. Shybut, and M. DeCillis. 2018. “Orphan Wells in California: An Initial Assessment of the State’s Potential Liabilities to Plug and Decommission Orphan Oil and Gas Wells.” Technical Report. (California Council on Science & Technology). https://ccst.us/wp-content/uploads/CCST-Orphan-Wells-in-California-An-Initial-Assessment.pdf
CalGEM, 2022. “SB 1147 Report: Offshore Oil & Gas Operations Abandonment (Prepared Pursuant to Senate Bill 1147).” https://www.conservation.ca.gov/calgem/pubs_stats/Documents/SB%201147%20Offshore%20Abandonment%20Legislative%20Report%20Final%202022.pdf
González, D. et al. 2023. “Temporal Trends of Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Population Exposures to Upstream Oil and Gas Development in California.” GeoHealth 7(3): 1-18.
Howe, C. et al. 2016. “Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 3: 547–565. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915620017
Masters, N. 2016. “Three Decades Before Porter Ranch, a Methane Explosion Derailed L.A.’s Subway Plans.” PBS SoCal (February 23). https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/three-decades-before-porter-ranch-a-methane-explosion-derailed-l-a-s-subway-plans.
Schuwerk, R. and G. Rogers. 2020. “Billion Dollar Orphans: Why Millions of Oil and Gas Wells Could Become Wards of State” (Carbon Tracker). https://carbontracker.org/reports/billion-dollar-orphans/
Shamasunder, B. et al. 2023. “The Geography and Health Consequences of Drilling in Los Angeles: An Update on a Decade of Research” in The Power of Persistence (Los Angeles: Liberty Hill). https://www.libertyhill.org/news/reports/power-of-persistence-summer-2023/
Sierra Club, 2023. “$23 Billion Question: What Created California’s Orphan and Idle Well Crisis?” https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/2023-12/Idle%20Wells%20Report.pdf
Smith, D. 2022. “In Historic Move, Los Angeles Bans New Oil Wells, Phases Out Existing Ones.” LA Times (December 22). https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-02/in-historic-move-l-a-bans-new-oil-wells-phases-out-existing-ones.
Szeman, I. 2016. After Oil (Edmonton: University of Alberta).
Weszkalnys, G. 2023. “Stranded Liabilities.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights (January 24). https://culanth.org/fieldsights/stranded-liabilities
